Enhancement of Mississippi's Criminal History System

The goal of the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) is to improve the Nation's safety and security by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information and by insuring the nationwide implementation of criminal justice and noncriminal justice background check systems. BJS provides direct financial and technical assistance to the states to improve criminal history and other related records and to build their infrastructure to connect to national record check systems both to supply information and to conduct the requisite checks.

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety (MDPS) is designated by the Mississippi's Governor's Office to administer criminal history improvement programs for the State. Under the 2015 NCHIP priority areas, the MDPS will conduct the following projects: 1) Purchase and update equipment needed for the Mississippi Criminal Information Center's (MCIC) network and its employees. The MDPS will purchase laptop workstations for the CJIS Security Officer, Systems Manager, and Lead System Administrator for the MCIC. MDPS will also purchase dot matrix printers for MCIC personnel who perform queries and verify information for wanted persons, missing people, stolen vehicles, criminal histories, driver's license, VIN numbers, and vehicle registration information when one of the State's law enforcement officers enters information in NCIC for a person listed as a Mississippi resident. In addition, NCHIP will fund the replacement of aging network switches, and perform a VMWare upgrade. 2) Rehost the State's message switch and its related equipment. The purpose of the project is to replace the existing legacy hardware and convert the existing legacy operating system from AIX to Linux. This is being performed to lower annual hardware/software maintenance costs and to maximize the operation of the current central message switch. The message switch functions as a broker between the state, other states, and the federal government to send and receive criminal information queries and is crucial to information sharing with all state and federal law enforcement agencies. 3) Rehost the Mississippi Criminal History System (MCHS) and its related equipment. The MCHS servers host the MS criminal history database and the workflow that interfaces with the MS AFIS, the MS criminal justice message switch, and the FBI NGI/III. The objective of this project is to upgrade the current server hardware and operating system to current versions. 4) Develop a background-check tracking workflow in MCHS. Each month the MCIC receives and processes over 300 requests for noncriminal justice background checks for child adoptions, day care positions, immigration, etc., these requests are for either fingerprint-based or name-based background checks that cannot be submitted from local agency live scans. The current workflow in this background check request system includes labor-intensive manual steps to manage/track requests, perform checks against the State criminal history repository and the State Sex Offender registry, generate the appropriate correspondence, and generate accounting reports. 5) Develop a workflow for local law enforcement agencies and the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) to resubmit rejected arrest and inmate-intake transactions to the FBI. Currently, there is no timely and efficient method for the original submitter to correct the fingerprints and resubmit the transaction if it was accepted by the MCHS AFIS but rejected by the FBI. The current process is inconvenient to the local agencies and requires manual processing, including temporary expunctions, by the MCIC. The objective/goal of this project is to create a new workflow in the MCHS that allows the original submitter to resubmit a transaction. Another goal is to ensure the most complete criminal history is available for agencies.

CA/NCF